Web » That Not So Fresh Feeling

The Amazing Serendipity of the Interwebs

May 152011

I think, by far, my favorite thing about the interwebs is the ability to randomly stumble across an incredible story you didn’t even know you were interested in. Today, while just doing my normal web reading—hitting a handful of pages, RSS feeds, Twitter, etc.—I stumble across someone mentioning the John 3:16 guy.

You know, this guy:

He’s the guy who any sports-loving kid who grew up in the early 80s knows as the random rainbow wig dude who showed up every major sporting event and managed to get on TV. I’m guessing, like me, pretty much everyone assumed he was a well-intentioned goofball, just trying to get on TV.

I think we all just assumed he was a precursor to the modern day Jumbotron morons who get wear stupid outfits, do stupid dances, or hold up stupid signs, all in the name of getting on the in-arena Jumbotron (not even getting on real TV).

Except, turns out, he was a grade-A certifiable nutjob. And that’s the amazingness of the interwebs. You can start your day reading about technology, sports, the weather, whatever, and end up seeing the John 3:16 guy, finding him on Wikipedia, reading some of the articles about him, and then adding the documentary about him to your Netflix queue. Learning about how he went from wearing a rainbow wig to attempting to buy a gun to shoot then candidate Bill Clinton.

So yeah, he’s not just a cuddly crazy guy, he’s a legit crazy guy. It’s worth the read. A guy who, in a different era, would have been likely exiled to the dustbin of history, only remembered in microfiche, has his story told in a documentary, written into Wikipedia, and available to everyone at the end of a hyperlink or search query.

Ah, the interwebs.

You Can’t Replace Email if You Require Email — The Brooks Review

Technology, Web No Responses »

May 092011

“You can’t replace pants with shorts when your definition of shorts is: everyone buy pants and cut the legs off — pants will still be a viable business (the consumer is just altering the usage). Same too with Twitter, Facebook, et al, they are still relying on email for certain parts of their service (like adding new users or sending notifications) while wanting to replace email at the same time.”

I hadn’t really thought about the ubiquitousness of email from this angle before. Even the services that are trying to replace email as the primary communications channel require you to have an email address. Obviously, this is because a) today email is the way they are used to getting their communication of passwords, logins, etc., and b) you have to have a way to communicate to people before they start using your service.

But, it would be pretty ballsy for some new service to require either email or a phone number (or <insert your method of identity here>).

(via The Brooks Review)

Pow: Zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X

Rails, Web No Responses »

Apr 072011

Pow: Zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X: “Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute.”

Holy awesomesauce. Build (or clone from github) a bunch of Rails or Rack apps on your local machine, run them with a tiny server using real hostnames based off of symlinks.

This is just one of those tiny “why didn’t I think of that” things that makes 37signals so good.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Twitter Broke the Web

Twitter, Web, Web hosting No Responses »

Aug 062009

With Twitter being down, and feeling the need to spew out characters to the Twinterweb, I opened up trusty MarsEdit and decided to update my good ol’ blog.

That’s when I realized how much Twitter had taken over.

I hadn’t logged into my web interface in a bit, so I had a WordPress update, 4 plugin updates, and a bunch of pending spam. I cleared that out and then started crafting a post in MarsEdit. As I went to post those fateful words, MarsEdit choked on an XML-RPC error complaining about bad content.

I quickly scanned through recent post, looked for bad characters. I used the Googles to try to find an explanation. Finally, I noticed that each page of my blog was spitting out a PHP warning (because, you know, PHP is pretty dumb, and I’m too lazy to have turned off warnings) that it couldn’t download my latest tweets from Twitter.

One quick click of “Disable” and MarsEdit sprung back to life.

Twitter was breaking my site.

At which point, it dawned on me, that at this point, Twitter being down is like having part of the internet’s routing being down. It’s tied into so many systems, and so much traffic/content flows through it, that when it goes kablooey, all that content has to route elsewhere. Which then floods those systems, and they start to struggle and burst at the seams a bit, and then folks overflow into another system, and so on.

Until, the end result, of course, is that Twitter was breaking my site.

Here’s a graphical representation: